>Check out 25-1!>

Fifty albums seems like a lot, huh? Not when considering the music taste of Allston Pudding, a staff of whose collective palate spans anywhere from Banks to Bach, Terry Malts to traditional Latvian polka. Forming this list took longer than planned. After scribbling what seemed like hundreds of album titles across a whiteboard, we ended up with a selection far greater than fifty. What were we to do from there?

What we did was talk. To start, we went over each album on our list individually, weighing our take on LPs we didn’t feel particularly compelling. This was trickier than you’d expect. Get a group of die-hard music fanatics to settle on a collection of tunes, and you’re bound to have arguments. Tweedy? Out. Antlers? Not this year. A Death Grips filibuster and was painfully overruled.

After whittling the list down to a well-rounded fifty, we did the only thing we could. Math. Our top albums were decided entirely by the complex rules of addition we learned in 2nd grade. After tallying scores we stepped back and looked at our results. The list was entirely perfect, that is, until we added a very particular fifty-first. Because we don’t just acknowledge the sheen of pop culture, we live to eat it up.

*= Local 

51. 1989 – Taylor Swift

50. Heigh Ho – Blake Mills

49. Pom Pom – Ariel Pink

48. Manipulator – Ty Segall

47. Black Moon Spell – King Tuff